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Saving sunshine for a rainy day: New catalyst offers efficient storage of alternative energies
http://news.engineering.utoronto.ca/saving-sunshine-rainy-day-new-catalyst-offers-efficient-storage-alternative-energies/[font face=Serif]March 24, 2016 | Marit Mitchell
[font size=5]Saving sunshine for a rainy day: New catalyst offers efficient storage of alternative energies[/font]
[font size=3]We can’t control when the wind blows and when the sun shines, so finding efficient ways to store energy from alternative sources remains an urgent research problem. Now, a group of researchers led by Professor Ted Sargent at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering may have a solution inspired by nature.
The team has designed the most efficient catalyst for storing energy in chemical form, by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, just like plants do during photosynthesis. Oxygen is released harmlessly into the atmosphere, and hydrogen, as H₂, can be converted back into energy using hydrogen fuel cells.
…
This new catalyst facilitates the oxygen-evolution portion of the chemical reaction, making the conversion from H₂O into O₂ and H₂ more energy-efficient than ever before. The intrinsic efficiency of the new catalyst material is over three times more efficient than the best state-of-the-art catalyst.
The new catalyst is made of abundant and low-cost metals tungsten, iron and cobalt, which are much less expensive than state-of-the-art catalysts based on precious metals. It showed no signs of degradation over more than 500 hours of continuous activity, unlike other efficient but short-lived catalysts. Their work was published online today in the leading journal Science.
…[/font][/font]
[font size=5]Saving sunshine for a rainy day: New catalyst offers efficient storage of alternative energies[/font]
[font size=3]We can’t control when the wind blows and when the sun shines, so finding efficient ways to store energy from alternative sources remains an urgent research problem. Now, a group of researchers led by Professor Ted Sargent at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering may have a solution inspired by nature.
The team has designed the most efficient catalyst for storing energy in chemical form, by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, just like plants do during photosynthesis. Oxygen is released harmlessly into the atmosphere, and hydrogen, as H₂, can be converted back into energy using hydrogen fuel cells.
…
This new catalyst facilitates the oxygen-evolution portion of the chemical reaction, making the conversion from H₂O into O₂ and H₂ more energy-efficient than ever before. The intrinsic efficiency of the new catalyst material is over three times more efficient than the best state-of-the-art catalyst.
The new catalyst is made of abundant and low-cost metals tungsten, iron and cobalt, which are much less expensive than state-of-the-art catalysts based on precious metals. It showed no signs of degradation over more than 500 hours of continuous activity, unlike other efficient but short-lived catalysts. Their work was published online today in the leading journal Science.
…[/font][/font]